The Full Court Press of Knishes

J. Lin not pictured.

Scheming, scheming, bubble & boil! Mid-week, I did a full-court knish press to present a full plate to a fellow traveller on the path of starting an updated modern Jewish-inspired food product. In the house was none other than one of my original inspirations to get knishy with it, Danny Macaroon, of, ummm, Danny Macaroons! (Noah Knish just doesn't have the same ring to it.) I caught sight of a Danny Macaroon table at Smorgasburg last summer, a week before I attended Laura Silver's knish lecture, and it all just clicked.  Later in the summer, I introduced myself to Danny, and this that and the other, he's comin' to dinner!

I spent a day in the kitchen while looking after the baby, had a baby sitter come in the afternoon -- thank goodness, because I was getting nothing done. Having to run out because you discovered that your potatoes were too close to the oven and sprouted over night didn't help with the schedule.

Full court press: one day, two different kinds of dough, 2 different cooking methods, nine different fillings. Here is a run down of what I made, with notes on production and outcome....

Square circled

• Potato: Kinda like how vanilla ice cream custard is a base for many many other flavors of ice cream, the potato filling is great on it's own, but is also used as a base for the spinach, sweet potato and broc-ched, as well as a binder for the kasha. This batch came out well, but I went a little too far with the salt, brought it right up to the edge of big flavor/too salty. For the other knishes that took it in, I skipped adding more salt.
• Fried Potato: Second time I've whipped these up, again surprised how good they are. 400 degree peanut oil, same filling and dough as the baked, just square and contained. Plop in the square in, wait until it looks nice and golden & serve. Talking to Danny Mac, I realized how hard these will be to sell in any setting other than where it is fried to order. Damn my American palate, this is good! 

Multiknishical

• Spinach - Roasted Garlic: Four heads of garlic roasted in the oven, wrapped in foil and hit with oil and salt. Only gave it an hour, tasted good but a bit too firm, had to run them through the garlic press. Did about a 3/4 spinach to 1/4 potato mix as an experiment and...yup, 50/50 is the right way to go. This was the only knish Danny Mac didn't finish, said he wasn't a huge garlic fan. On one hand, if the garlic was mushier, it would have blended in better, lesson learned. Then again, Danny has macaroons for brains, so what the heck does he know?!

The Children's Champion

• Broccoli-Cheddar: Working only with what was on hand, I didn't have as much broc as I'd like so I chopped in finer to spread it. (Once concept taught in c-school: the more surface area you give an ingredient, the more able it is to contact the taste buds and give a bigger flavor.)  Hmmm - still needs more broc BUT I do like the texture and mouthfeel of small bits of broc. I imagine next time when I up the broc amount, the flavor (amplified by the fat of the cheese) will step up a level. Of note, this seems to be the only knish my toddler seems to go gaga for.

Yam, Bam, Thank You Maam!

• Sweet Potato: I don't like sweet potatoes, they have a weird texture and are too damn sweet to be a potato. 

Oh Sweet P, how did I ever doubt you?!

However, when mixed 50/50 with the plain potato mix, it works to give a nice light orange color, it becomes extra silky instead of loose, and the note of sweet is just right. I'm happy.

Ka$ha is no second rate Lady KnaKna. -sigh- I'm sorry.

• Kasha: There is a reason why you hit your freshly toasted kasha with boiling water and not cold water: if you hit it with cold then bring it up to heat, you will have very mushy kasha - instead of soft individual grains, you will have an undifferentiated gray mass that looks like mashed potatoes that have been used, abused and left for dead. I tossed the first pot and started over, but it made me think - some day, I may have a use for this, a trick where I can subtly add kasha flavor to something without the granular texture...
• Brisket: Oy. Oy. What the what! I just made brisket knishes for the first time a few weeks ago, and I held aside a cup of my last brisket in the freezer for this. However, instead of going to the nice market, I sourced my tripe from a small super market close by. It read "Canadian-previously frozen" and was a half section of a roll of tripe, unlike last tripe I used, which was fresh and NY State raised. So as with before, I boiled the hell out of it for about 3 ours. Last time, no issues, it came out looking a little bit smaller but ready for grinding. THIS time, after 10 minutes, a weird bleachy ammonia smell took over my kitchen for an hour, and when I checked it 3 hours later, it had disappeared!! Dissolved into the water, leaving behind a few threads of white snotty-looking slime!!! Aigh dios mio!!! So suffice to say, these brisket knishes went with out the softening power of nice bouncy tripe, and like a meat perogie in a Slavic diner in the East Village in the early 80s, were a bit heavy. I mixed it 50/50 with kasha, which flavor wise was the right deal, but it was just a bit leaden. Perhaps I could have thrown a few eggs in there. Next time I'm gonna get the right tripe.

Oatmeal  Hashbrown Knish: it's what's for breakfast

• Hash Brown-Oatmeal: First time experiment, needs work but the concept is solid. Start with some left over oatmeal. Not some lame quick cooking rolled faff, but proper hardcore steel cut Irish oats. No half-oatin'! I prepare my breakfast oatmeal with brown sugar, salt, butter, vanilla and cinnamon. It keeps it real up in the hizzy. It makes me speak 1990s ebonics, yo. Any way, like kasha, this grain needs a potato counter point. So instead of going to the potato knish mix bowl, I cubed a potato and cooked it in butter.

MC Potato Hash lockin' it down

Then the potatoes met the oatmeal and was joined by two other breakfast elements: some egg and some maple syrup....

Maple sizzyrup!

In the end, not particularly good but has potential. I liked the syrup's flavor, the whole thing is sweet and savory, and the browning of the potatoes gave a nice toasty flavor that complimented the oatmeal. In the future, the potatoes will be cubed smaller, and in addition to syrup, all the add ins of the oatmeal (brown sugar, vanilla, etc) will be amped up. Also, lose the butter and use oil or shortening, to keep it in a kosher stylee....

• Chocolate Hazelnut: Due to time constraints, rather than continue to experiment with hazelnut paste and dutched cocoa, I reverted back to an earlier recipe from the Knishening, that involved Nutella. The filling hit it's mark, and Danny Macaroon seemed to really like it (he is a man with a professional sweet tooth, after all) but I'm still not happy with it's form factor.

A carpenter's dream

Cooking it loaf style on a flat sheet just makes it go too flat, and to keep it at a reasonable portion, it looks too much like a cookie. I want knishes! I think I just need to find some long, thin loaf pans or something.

 So there ya go. If your still reading this, you must really care! (Or at least really like ebonics-based jokes!)  Since you've come this far, a note on KnisheryNYC's future...

As I hinted at earlier in the post, I got NOTHING done while having a 3 month old baby underfoot. I've come to the realization from this day of cooking that my plans for the season are overly optimistic, if I don't want to semi-abandon my young family. I was thinking a few tables every weekend, but now I think one or two tables this season is more likely. In addition, I have 2 or 3 vendors in mind who expressed interest in carrying my knishes in their shops, which means anyone can go get 'em anytime -- expect some announcements in the next few months. Around that time, I'll start offering special orders to the public. In the begining, it'll be limited to the 5 boros, but once I get the packaging down, shipping will be offered to. 

Thanks for everyone's enthusiasm and support so far! I hope to get a knish in yo mouf sooner than later. F'shizzle!

ADDENDUM

 

Want to see this child boop a raw knish? Here ya go...

(all booped knishes were promptly unbooped then baked in a 400 degree oven to prevent boopalism)

Knishnaut: One is Not Like the Other

Left: Old & Busted. Right: Like Will Smith in MIB, it makes this style look good.

Knishes are baked...unless they are fried. Among the pizzaratti, there is something called the "Pizza Cognition Theory." It states that:

The first slice of pizza a child sees and tastes (and somehow appreciates on something more than a childlike, mmmgoood, thanks-mom level), becomes, for him, pizza. He relegates all subsequent slices, if they are different in some manner from that first triangle of dough and cheese and tomato and oil and herbs and spices, to a status that we can characterize as not pizza.

Now take out the word pizza, and insert the word knish. For the average New Yorker, the defining knish is not Mrs. Stahls, the same way most pizza-heads can't really claim Di Fara's as their ur-slice. For many (particularly non-Jewish) people, if they have an early, formative experience with a knish from the days before foodies and artisanal mayonnaise, it would be... this:

Deep fried squares, usually sold from a cart along side hot dogs, an echo of the time of knish-carts from the time of our grandparents. These are Gabila's knishes, a.k.a. Coney Island–style knishes, and while I may take time at a later point to delve into this history, only three things are of import here:

1. They are not too available on carts anymore due to DOH & Giuliani, but are still widely available in supermarkets.
2. They are fully enclosed in dough.
3. They are deep fried, not baked.

So a few days ago, in an attempt to eat healthier after eating way too much crap for the week before and few weeks after my son Lil' Knyshy was born, I decided to make some spinach knishes, strictly for home use. With some left over dough and some plain potato filling, I strapped on my knishnaut helmet and I went to work on exploring the outer reaches of what my knishtchen could produce....

Mandatory nudie knish pic, you pervert.

Well, it's square--so, square I made it. Well, rectangular, anyway. It's hip to be a square, and it's post modern to be a rectangle.

For ODB, as he likes his knishes raw.

Then I folded it up, used a bench scraper to seal the edges and then....

Little did he know that it was not a Jacuzzi...

In culinary school, we spent weeks on each method of cooking -- sautéeing & pan frying, roasting & baking, poaching & braising, curing & smoking & more. Only one method got a single solitary day: deep frying. In the lecture part of the class, the chef explained that if you have your time and temp right in deep fry, you are pretty much guaranteed to come out delicious -- and that's why the combination of fancy egg-timer-technology and non-trained high school drop outs can make perfect french fries at McDonalds for 50+ years all over the globe.

But a handmade knish does not come with time and temp instructions, so I had to wing it. Using a quart of peanut oil (peanut, because it has a high smoke point) that I zapped up really hot -- 500 degrees (french fries go good at around 450), I decided to just eyeball the frying until it looked about right. Unlike fried chicken, I would not have to worry about pre-cooked innards being raw, and a higher fry temp would prevent much oil from being absorbed by my knish.

Boil, boil, toil & trouble.

The knish started looking pretty golden at about 30 seconds, and I let it go for another 15 to get some nice mahogany spots all over the crust, guaranteeing some nice brown flavor. I cut it open, and it was nice and hot on the inside.

I am an American. If you deep fry it, I've been trained to automatically like it. When I went to try this knish, I was thinking, "Well, I didn't make any consideration for this method -- I'm using the same dough and the same filling as a baked knish, so let's pay attention to how this needs to be adjusted." After taking a bite, my only thought was, "Oh my. I need to take another bite." And my second thought was, "If my grandma was from Mumbai instead of Israel, this would be her very oniony, very underspiced samosa." And my third thought was, "Oh shut up, stop thinking so much, this is kinda good." I have a few ideas for improvements, but this was a very auspicious Coney-style knish v 1.0.

I had a few Gabila's knishes lying around (because if you are a Knishman, Rule 38.3 of the Lifestyle Code dictates you must always have a few Gabilas lying around) so I put them down, head to head.

Two generations.

Which one would you like to eat?

ADDENDUM: I was hoping to do a round of holiday knishes for special order for Hanukkah/Xmas/New Years ever for special order, like I did for Thanksgiving. While making this recent round of knishes, I took responsibility for caring for Lil Knyshy:

Lil' Knishy rides a bouncy table full o' Spinach Knishes

Caring for an infant while making 72+ knishes is like working with one hand tied behind your back. It took me a little longer, but all the knishes came out to my satisfaction, and in the evening I got into mad-scientist mode with the boiling oil after everyone went to sleep.

However, the preschool my toddler attends was put on emergency hiatus (another story for a non-food-blog post) and for the next two weeks I will have two arms and one leg tied up plus a rope around my waist tying me to a cranky radiator. So I will be forced to skip this holiday season and focus on some winter holidays -- please check out the poll on this blog as well as our Facebook page.

Thanks to everyone for their support!